It was with feelings such as one might entertain when looking at a mermaid or an inhabitant of Mars, that I first saw a genuine Negrito in a prison at Manila. The wretched pigmy had been brought in to the city from his inaccessible retreat in the great forest; he was dazed and frightened at the white men and the things they did. He was a miserable little fellow, with distrustful eyes, and twisted legs, and pigeon toes. He died after a few days of captivity, during which time he had not spoken. A dumb obedience marked his relations with the guard. The white man’s civilization was as disagreeable and unnatural to him as his nomadic life would be to us. A fish could just as well live out of water as this pigmy in the white man’s land.
A few of the Negritos near the coast, however, have been touched by civilizing influences. They inhabit towns of small huts built on poles, which they abandon on the death of any one within. The house wherein a death occurs is generally burned. They plant a little corn and rice, but often move away before the crop is harvested. They are too lazy to raise anything; too weak to capture slaves. During the heavy rains, when the great woods are saturated, they protect themselves against the cold by wrapping blankets around their bodies. At night they often share the tree with birds and monkeys, sheltered from rain and dampness by the canopy of foliage. They have a head man for their villages—sometimes a member of another tribe, who, on account of his superior attainments, holds the respect of all. They hunt with bows and arrows; weapons which, by means of constant use, they handle with dexterity. At night their villages are located through the incessant barking of the hungry dogs, which always follow them around. Sleeping in huts, in order to prevent mosquitoes from annoying them, they often build a fire beneath them, toasting themselves until their flesh becomes a crust of scales.
In the south Camarines, and in Negros, they will often come down to the coast towns, trading the wax and sweet potatoes of the mountains for sufficient rice to last them several days. They sometimes work a day or two in the adjacent hemp or rice fields, receiving for their labor a small measure of the rice. When they have eaten this, they fast until their hunger drives them down to work again. Their marriage relations are peculiar. While the father of the family has but one true wife, a number of women are dependent on him, widows or relatives who have attached themselves to him. The children receive their names from rivers, animals, or trees. If they were taken out of their environment when very young they might be educated, as experiments have shown that the Negrito children have the same impulses of generosity, the same attachment to their friends, the same joys, sorrows, and sensations, that belong to children everywhere. Only their little souls are lost forever in the wilderness.
Neither the pagan tribes nor the Negritos read or write. The Moros, too, are very ignorant, only the priests and students being able to read passages from the Koran and make the Arabic characters. The latest Malay immigrants, who had been influenced by Indian culture, introduced a style of writing that is very queer. Three vowels were used,—a, e, and u. The consonants were represented by as many signs that look a good deal like our shorthand. Although there were three characters to represent the vowels when used alone, whenever a consonant would be pronounced with “a,” only the sign of the consonant was used. In order to express a final consonant, or one without the vowel, a tiny cross was made below the character. If “e” was wanted, a dot would be placed over the letter that expressed the consonant, or if the vowel was to be “u,” the dot was placed below.
Some rainy day, when you have nothing else to do, you can invent some characters to represent our consonants, and with the aid of dots and crosses, write a letter to yourself, and see how you would get along if you were forced to use that kind of alphabet at school. The natives use the Spanish alphabet to-day, which is much like our own. Their language, being full of particles, sounds very funny when they talk. All you would understand would be perhaps, pag, naga, naca, mag, tag, paga; and all this would probably convey but little meaning to you. It is a curious fact that while the dialects of all the tribes are different, many of the ordinary words are common, being slightly changed in the transition. The language is of a Malayan origin, but has a number of Sanskrit words as well as Arabic. From studying these dialects, comparing the construction of the sentence as expressed by different tribes, and by comparing the inflections of homogeneous verbs and nouns, one might arrive at the conclusion that these tribes and races, differing so strikingly among each other, mutually antagonistic, all belong to one great family and have a common origin. But that is a question for the anthropologists to settle; one that will give even the professors all the trouble that they want, and make them wrinkle up their learned foreheads, while among them they arrive at widely-varying decisions, which will be as mutually exclusive as the tribes themselves.
It was a rainy day in the dense woods along the Iligan-Marahui road. The soft ground oozed beneath the feet, and a continual dripping was kept up from the low-hanging, saturated foliage. The Moro interpreter, in a red-striped suit and prominent gilt buttons, had come into camp with the report that one of the dattos at Malumbung wanted the military doctor to come up and treat his child, who was afflicted with a fever. The datto had offered protection for the “medico,” and, as a fee, a bottle of pure gold. The guides and soldiers, who were waiting in the forest, would conduct the doctor to Malumbung if he cared to go.
“This sounds like a pretty good adventure,” said the commanding officer to me. “How would you like to go along?” The doctor had accepted the offer of the Moros, and he now reiterated the commanding officer’s invitation. “It’s going to be a rather long, stiff hike,” he said. “We’ll have to sleep to-night out in the woods, and there’s no telling whether the Moros mean good faith or not. Remember that, in case the child should die while I am there, the Moros will believe that I have killed it, and will probably make matters more or less unpleasant for us both. I operated once upon a fellow over in Tagaloan who died under the knife. As soon as the spectators saw that he was hardly due to come to life again, they crowded around me with their bolos drawn, and if a friend of mine among them had not interfered, I would have followed my subject very speedily.”
It was arranged that we take with us a small squad of regulars to carry the provisions and go armed, “in case there should be any game upon the way.” As this arrangement seemed to satisfy the Moros, though it did not please them much, we started, covering the first half mile along the clayey road through driving rain, and turning off into the Moro trail around the summit of the hill. The Moros led the way with their peculiar lurching stride that covered a surprising distance in a very short time. Soon we were in the heart of the vast wilderness. We passed by colonies of monkeys, who severely reprimanded us from their secure retreat among the tree-tops. One of the soldiers killed a python with his Krag—a swollen creature, that could hardly be distinguished from the overhanging vines—that measured twenty feet from head to tail. The Moros silently unslipped their knives, and dextrously removed the skin. We camped that night in shelter tents, although the ground was soaked, and a cold breath penetrated the damp woods. All night the jungle-fowl and monkeys kept up an incessant obligato, and the forest seemed to re-echo with mysterious and far-off sounds. At daylight we pushed on, and late in the afternoon arrived at the small Moro settlement. The tiny nipa houses, set up on bamboo poles, were rather a poor substitute for shelter; but on reaching them after our two days in the forest, it was like arriving in a civilized community. The doctor went immediately to the datto’s house, a large one with a steep roof, where he dosed the infant with a little quinine.
There were about five hundred Moros in the village under the datto, who ruled absolutely as by hereditary right. While he, of course, was feudal to the nearest sultan, in his own community he was a lord and prince. Most of the people were his slaves and fighting men. His private warriors, or his bodyguard, were armed with krisses, campalans, and spears, with shields of carabao hide, and coats of mail of buffalo-horn, as defensive armor. The favorite weapons of the datto were elaborately inlaid with the ivory cut from the tusks of the wild boar. His dress was also distinctive, and when new must have been very brilliant. It was fastened with pearl buttons, while along the outside seams of his tight pantaloons a row of smaller buttons ran. A dirty silk handkerchief wound around his head, the corner overlapping on the side, made an appropriate and fitting headgear. He had several wives, for whom he had paid in all a sum amounting to a hundred sacks of rice and twenty cattle. He had lost considerably on his speculations, having divorced three wives and being unable to secure a rebate on the price that he had paid for them.